More Results in Site: Search Without www

Why are there less results than for site:example.com than site:www.example.com

[NZRockClimber]

Why is it when I type site:www then my url I have 36 pages listed but when I type site: not including www. I have 300. Which is what google actoley holds?

[ciml]

I suspect that either you have a lot of pages listed under your domain without the www, or you're seeing two different sets of results from different datacentres.

[nuevojefe]

without www. it will include sub-domains. Do you have any?

[ciml]

It also includes pages on a URL that isn't a subdomain of the domain, e.g. http://example.com/pagename.html

[dibbern]

This can be a very serious problem.

What you are seeing might be evidence that you have a canonicalization issue. (I hope I spelled that correctly!)

One of my client sites fell into this over the last year, and it has been a terrible experience to work out of. I got excellent help on this forum, and have discussed with G., and am working out of the black hole a little bit each day.

Our most important rankings went from around #4 to somewhere in the 800's. Its an e-comm site in a very competitive market, so you can imagine what this has done to business.

I can't say enough about how much I respect the expertise and attitude of the people on this forum. Without them, I'd still be wondering what happened.

[nuevojefe]

It also includes pages on a URL that isn't a subdomain of the domain, e.g. [example.com...]

Absolutely.

It also includes URLs on a domain that are a subdomain but are not index pages, such as [subdomain.example.com...]

Hopefully that's helpful, but I kinda couldn't resist. :-)

[ken_b]

How do you fix this problem?

[jdMorgan]

On Apache, use mod_rewrite to redirect all non-www requests to www (or vice-versa, but pick one).
On IIS, use ISAPI Rewrite to do the same thing.

Another suggestion:
Always link to your 'home page' as "/", not as index.html or index.php. Otherwise, you can get the same duplication problem, but at a different level.

In either case, the trick is to be utterly consistent, so as not to confuse the search engine spiders. Counting on them to sort it out in your favor is equivalent to "relying on the kindness of strangers" -- Sometimes it works, and sometimes you get hurt.

Jim

[nuevojefe]

Yea, as JDMorgan said above:

Always link to your 'home page' as "/", not as index.html or index.php. Otherwise, you can get the same duplication problem, but at a different level.

Stay consistent with adding the / on the end of your links (internal and those you get from others). [example.com...]

[NZRockClimber]

Hey thanks for your help, I've been changing all my index.html to / as suggested. It's a strange situation as google seems to be dropping 30 pages a day and I am now recieving no refferals a day from them I used to get 50 a day but for 4 days now zero.

A worrying situation thank goodness it has only happened on all-rock-climbing-gear and not some of my othere sites

[Blackguy]

is there a difference when we link internally or externally if we add / and not adding it?

meaning www.example.com and www.example.com/

[g1smd]

Try it!

Type in whatever domain you want as www.example.com and then look at what address is shown in the URL bar when the page is loaded.

You'll see the / has been added as (just about) every server does a redirect from www.domain.com to www.domain.com/ - so if you add the / yourself, you avoid the server having to do that step.

[my3cents]

for apache you can use this in your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [yourdomain.com...] [R=permanent,L]

[dickbaker]

Could someone please explain, in simple layman's terms, how to do a 301 redirect for a non-www address to the www address on an IIS server?

Thanks for any reply.

[g1smd]

The example directly above your post was an example of Mod_Rewrite as used on an Apache webserver.

.

For a M$ box you will need either ISAPI_Rewrite or IIS_Rewrite.

Google for "ISAPI 301 Redirect" and you'll find loads of tutorials.